What are the impediments to designing the ultimate game?

[GrizzlyTank]

The closest we get to a game for everyone is Roblox...

[Illmaeran]

Open a restaurant that caters to a specific style of food though where you may have only 15-20 items on the menu but all of a super high quality and business will be booming...

Watched Kitchen Nightmares much?

You're not wrong.



I guess I'm just lucky; this is my Ultimate MMO. If they made housing available to everyone and opened up being able to glamour all items regardless of the job, it would be my perfect MMO. I've played a number of different MMOs that I enjoyed substantially in their time, but none of them grabbed me quite the same way as XIV has. Vanilla WoW was my first MMO, and you never forget your first love, but everything that XIV is and everything that it isn't, keeps me in love with it and always coming back when I've had to take breaks.

[Deveryn]

The only impediment is the fact that it just isn't possible.

This has been a topic for years and the same conclusion is always reached. MMOs are among the most difficult to put out and keep fresh. Everyone has a different idea of what they'd want in a game, but nobody actually knows what they want. Technical and financial barriers on both sides are always a problem. Perfection is a pipe dream, but the real winners out there work on making things less of a slog than they used to be.

XIV has one of the better (best?) update schedules I've ever seen and the philosophy of encouraging breaks seems to work well enough. They also keep even the oldest content fresh and easy to fill.

[RitsukoSonoda]

IMO one of the biggest things negatively impacting games in general is that companies keep trying to aim for this delusion that they can build a game that will appeal to everyone. This leads in drastic changes to the game formula on running franchises that cause them to lose fans from the franchise while often failing to attract enough new players to make up the difference. Additionally because they're piling other stuff they saw other games do into the title as well it often ends up a mess that drives players away as the new title is a hollow shell of what the previous games were. Some companies have also gone as far as to allow feedback from streamers direct major changes in direction their game take which generally ends poorly.

The only real negative thing of this game to me for an FF title is it's over simplified to the point it no longer feels like an FF series RPG. Elemental resistances are gone, damage resistances are gone, so basically outside of a handful of specific boss battles what you hit the monsters with makes no difference at all, you can burn a fire elemental to death with fire spells, beat a slime to death with a greatsword, stab a skeleton to death with a knife, drain HP from undead etc... Gear is literally just a power creep of raw numbers, there's no set effects, no passive bonuses outside of something specific like eureka/bozja gear. I'd really like them to bring back something like FFXI with a total overhaul to the game engine for better visuals and a smoother UI that wasnt based around macro keys and menu commands where there wasn't a singlular meta used for all content because certain jobs did better vs certain monster types and a huge amount of horizontal progression where lots of options existed at endgame providing different bonuses that didn't just contribute to number bloat. I'd even go as far to ask for the title to also go back to not automatically populating your maps with markers when you take quests so that some of the NPC dialogue actually matters since they tell you what they need or where you need to go.